Process and Reality — the Gifford Lectures, 1929

If the subject-predicate form of statement be taken to be metaphysically ultimate, it is then impossible to express this doctrine of feelings and their superject. It is better to say that the feelings aim at their subject, than to say that they are aimed at their subject. For the latter mode of expression removes the subject from the scope of the feeling and assigns it to an external agency. Thus the feeling would be wrongly abstracted from its own final cause. This final cause is an inherent element in the feeling, constituting the unity of that feeling. An actual entity feels as it does feel in order to be the actual entity which it is. In this way an actual entity satisfies Spinoza’s notion of substance: it is causa sui. The creativity is not an external agency with its own ulterior purposes. All actual entities share with God this characteristic of self-causation. For this reason every actual entity also shares with God the characteristic of transcending all other actual entities, including God. Thep. 340 universe is thus a creative advance into novelty. The alternative to this doctrine is a static morphological universe.

SECTION IV

There are three main categoreal conditions which flow from the final nature of things. These three conditions are: (i) the category of subjective unity, (11) the category of objective identity, and (iii) the category of objective diversity. Later we shall isolate five other categoreal conditions. But the three conditions mentioned above have an air of ultimate metaphysical generality.

The first category has to do with self-realization. Self-realization is the ultimate fact of facts. An actuality is self-realizing, and whatever is self-realizing is an actuality. An actual entity is at once the subject of self-realization, and the superject which is self-realized.

The second and third categories have to do with objective determination. All entities, including even other actual entities, enter into the self-realization of an actuality in the capacity of determinants of the definiteness of that actuality. By reason of this objective functioning of entities there is truth and falsehood. For every actuality is devoid of a shadow of ambiguity: it is exactly what it is, by reason of its objective definition at the hands of other entities. In abstraction from actualization, truth and falsehood are meaningless: we are in the region of nonsense, a limbo where nothing has any claim to existence. But definition is the soul of actuality: the attainment of a peculiar definiteness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process, so that by transcendence it passes into its objective immortality as a new objective condition added to the riches of definiteness attainable, the ‘real potentiality’ of the universe.

A distinction must here be made. Each task of creation is a social effort, employing the whole universe. Each novel actuality is a new partner adding a new conp. 341dition. Every new condition can be absorbed into additional fullness of attainment. On the other hand, each condition is exclusive, intolerant of diversities; except sc far as it finds itself in a web of conditions which convert its exclusions into contrasts. A new actuality may appear in the wrong society, amid which its claims to efficacy act mainly as inhibitions. Then a weary task is set for creative function, by an epoch of new creations to remove the inhibition. Insistence on birth at the wrong season is the trick of evil. In other words, the novel fact may throw back, inhibit, and delay. But the advance, when it does arrive, will be richer in content, more fully conditioned, and more stable. For in its objective efficacy an actual entity can only inhibit by reason of its alternative positive contribution.

A chain of facts is like a barrier reef. On one side there is wreckage, and beyond it harbourage and safety. The categories governing the determination of things are the reasons why there should be evil; and are also the reasons why, in the advance of the world, particular evil facts are finally transcended.

SECTION V

Category I. The many feelings which belong to an incomplete phase in the process of an actual entity, though unintegrated by reason of the incompleteness of the phase, are compatible for synthesis by reason of the unity of their subject.

This is the category of ‘subjective unity.’ This category is one expression of the general principle that the one subject is the final end which conditions each component feeling. Thus the superject is already present as a condition, determining how each feeling conducts its own process. Although in any incomplete phase there are many unsynthesized feelings, yet each of these feelings is conditioned by the other feelings. The process of each feeling is such as to render that feeling integrable with the other feelings.

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This category of subjective unity is the reason why no feeling can be abstracted from its subject. For the subject is at work in the feeling, in order that it may be the subject with that feeling. The feeling is an episode in self-production, and is referent to its aim. This aim is a certain definite unity with its companion feelings.

This doctrine of the inherence of the subject in the process of its production requires that in the primary phase of the subjective process there be a conceptual feeling of subjective aim: the physical and other feelings originate as steps towards realizing this conceptual aim through their treatment of initial data. This basic conceptual feeling suffers simplification in the successive phases of the concrescence. It starts with conditioned alternatives, and by successive decisions is reduced to coherence. The doctrine of responsibility is entirely concerned with this modification. In each phase the corresponding conceptual feeling is the ‘subjective end’ characteristic of that phase. The many feelings, in any incomplete phase, are necessarily compatible with each other by reason of their individual conformity to the subjective end evolved for that phase.

This category of subjective unity is a doctrine of preestablished harmony, applied to the many feelings in an incomplete phase. If we recur therefore to the seven kinds of ‘proper’ entities, and ask how to classify an incomplete phase, we find that it has the unity of a proposition. In abstraction from the creative urge by which each such phase is merely an incident in a process, this phase is merely a proposition about its component feelings and their ultimate superject. The pre-established harmony is the self-consistency of this proposition, that is to say, its capacity for realization. But such abstraction from the process does violence to its nature; for the phase 7s an incident in the process. When we try to do justice to this aspect of the phase, we must say that it is a proposition seeking truth. It is a lure to the supervention of those integrating feelings by which the mere

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